Cyberpunk As Naturalist Science Fiction

Cyberpunk as Naturalist Science Fiction Christophe Den Tandt, Université Libre de Bruxelles Urban Naturalism for the Computer Age Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982), based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), depicts a world Emile Zola, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and Raymond Chan- dler might have claimed as their own. The film opens with a panoramic view of an industrial megalopolis identified in screen captions as 2019 Los Angeles. Viewers discover a tangle of urban canyons, fire-spouting oil re- fineries, and huge pyramid- shaped high- rises. Los Angeles streets bathe in the glare of ubiquitous advertising graphics— neon signs, giant screens on the face of skyscrapers, floating dirigibles blaring out commercial mes- sages. The city’s crowds make up a multilingual mass exhibiting a dazzling plurality of ethnic or subcultural dress codes. Above all, the cityscape pro- claims through its manifold logos that it is a construct of powerful cor- porations. In the tradition of hard- boiled detective fiction, the film’s first scenes follow a private investigator (Harrison Ford) as he calls on some of the masters of this capitalistic world. Whereas in Dreiser or Chandler such figures would include steel, oil, or newspaper magnates, in Blade Runner they comprise corrupt policemen, genetic engineers, and robotics tycoons. Ridley Scott’s film reworks the thematics of urban naturalism and hard- boiled novels not only by scrutinizing the power structure of the urban- industrial scene but also by raising questions about the make- up of the human subjects inhabiting this dystopian environment. The pes- simism of classic literary naturalism was due to novelists’ suspicions that modern subjects are human beasts— characters like Frank Norris’s McTe- ague, superficially trained into the decorum of civilization, yet driven by Studies in American Naturalism • Summer 2013. Vol. 8, No. 1 © 2013 Studies in American Naturalism 94 Studies in American Naturalism vol. 8, no. 1 atavistic urges. Instead, turn- of- the- twenty- first- century science- fiction attributes the disquieting hybridity of humans to their ever more intimate relation to machines. Most humans and animals in Blade Runner are cy- borgs, compounding biological processes, industrial refitting, and artifi- cial intelligence. At one point, the private investigator, who specializes in hunting down rogue androids, is asked to gauge the biological status of the robotics tycoon’s secretary. It takes a personality test of more than a hundred questions, accompanied by eye scans and blush-response moni- toring, for him to ascertain that the young woman fails to elicit proper levels of human empathy and is therefore an engineered organism. She is similar to 2019 Los Angeles pet snakes or fishes: the latter are handcrafted artifacts whose genes display serial numbers. In early 1980s popular culture, Blade Runner marked the advent of cyberpunk, the science- fiction subgenre mapping the social relations generated by information and computer technologies. In an anecdote familiar to sf fans, William Gibson—who would become the major novelist of the budding movement— tried to see Ridley’s Scott’s film on its release, yet soon he had to flee from the movie theater because he felt the movie was uncomfortably close to his own vision of the future. The publication of Gibson’s award- winning first novel Neuromancer (1984) marked the break- through of cyberpunk’s literary production. The text— the first install- ment of Gibson’s “Sprawl Trilogy”—popularized a thematic feature that would prove definitional for all later instances of the genre: the evocation of polities electronically interlinked by what Gibson was the first to call “cyberspace” (Gibson, “Burning” 197). The label cyberpunk itself, coined by sf writer Bruce Bethke, refers to postmodern sf’s concern both with the socio- technological aspects of information-based societies and with the latter’s capacity to generate subcultures comparable to those spawned by rock music. Two years after Neuromancer, the short- story collection Mirror- shades (1988), edited by Bruce Sterling, publicized previous works by other members of the cyberpunk group—Sterling himself, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Mark Laidlaw, and Greg Bear. In addition to the Mirrorshades authors, later writers such as Neal Stephenson and Cory Doctorow joined the movement, expanding it toward what is sometimes labeled postcyberpunk. Though cyberpunk sf has found its most so- ciologically and technologically sophisticated expression in literature, it has inspired a significant film corpus comprising, beyond Blade Runner, Ste- ven Lisberger’s Tron (1982); David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) and eX- istenZ (1999); Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987); Andy and Larry Wachows- ki’s The Matrix (1998); and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002). Christophe Den Tandt 95 Towards a Transhistorical, Transgeneric Naturalism As cyberpunk maps the landscape of the near future, it perpetuates the tradition impelling realist/naturalist artists to provide a totalizing chart of new stages of social and industrial development. According to an ad- mittedly schematic narrative of contemporary culture, each surge of realism/naturalism— in mid- nineteenth- century Europe, the late nineteenth- century US, the 1930s, and indeed the 1980s—matches a moment when the need was felt to assess social reconfigurations that had rendered the field of urban-industrialism illegible. Mid-nineteenth- century English authors, reacting to the Industrial Revolution, borrowed an evocative label from essayist Thomas Carlyle in order to designate this literary- didactic venture: the “Condition- of- England” novel (Kettle 165). Similarly, cyberpunk provides a late twentieth-century condition-of- technocapitalism survey: it expresses the response of early 1980s observers to the social im- pact of the electronic media and the digital revolution. Anchoring cyberpunk in the realist/naturalist tradition raises prob- lems of literary-historical mapping and genre definition, however. Cy- berpunk authors claim a cultural lineage that pays abstract homage to socially oriented mimesis yet makes no explicit reference to the classic expressions of realism and naturalism and sometimes even explicitly de- viates from realism altogether. Within science fiction, Gibson, Sterling, and their fellow writers acknowledge literary influences ranging from early masters like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells; pulp- fiction stories and sf com- ics; technologically- oriented hard sf from the 1950s to the 1970s; as well as 1960s New- Wave authors like Harlan Ellison, Joanna Russ, Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, and J. G. Ballard. With regard to these antecedents, the cyberpunks profile themselves as realists insofar as they plead for a return to an sf idiom offering a scientifically informed assessment of technological change. In the prefaces to Mirrorshades and to Gibson’s Burning Chrome— two texts that acted as cyberpunk’s manifestos— Sterling con- tends that cyberpunk aims for the “self-consistent evocation of a credible future” (“Preface,” Burning 10). The new genre carries out a “return to the roots” of sf, reviving the spirit of Verne and Wells against later develop- ments (Sterling, “Preface,” Mirrorshades xi). In particular, cyberpunk dif- ferentiates itself from the production of 1960s and 1970s authors such as Ursula LeGuin and Roger Zelazny, whose works verge on “sword and sor- cery fantasies” (Sterling, “Preface,” Burning 10). Sterling’s claims suggest therefore that cyberpunk fits Darko Suvin’s definition of classic sf as hypothetical realism— a literary practice applying the epistemological prin- ciples of the empirical sciences to hypothetical projections of the future 96 Studies in American Naturalism vol. 8, no. 1 or to alternative constructions of reality (Suvin, “Poetics” 65; Suvin, “On Gibson” 352). Still, in an apparent departure from sociological mimesis, cyberpunk also relies on antirealist postmodernist sources— the technological allego- ries of Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs, for instance, from which they borrow their fascination for subcultures. Cyberpunk has according- ly been greeted as one of the pillars of popular postmodernism (Jame- son 38; Tabbi 215). It has generated a theoretical corpus—cybercriticism— investigating the postmodernist thematics of humankind’s shift into a posthuman future (Bukatman 30– 31). Also, cyberpunk’s realist credentials are undercut by the genre’s anchorage within mass culture. Cyberpunk is often sensationalistic and escapist. It resorts to the epic fabulation oth- erwise found in hard- boiled crime fiction or space opera: its narratives promise their readers maximum excitement and the reassuring prospect of their protagonists’ victory. In this context, instead of implausibly arguing that cyberpunk fits the classic concepts of realism and naturalism, we must redraw the latter genre categories in more inclusive terms: the definitions required for the pres- ent purpose should be, metaphorically speaking, long and broad. Realism/ naturalism must be stretched transhistorically to include texts chronologi- cally remote from classic nineteenth- century instances. These definitions must also be transgeneric: they must accommodate texts that, in addition to mapping social conditions, obey conventions unrelated to the realist/ naturalist canon. In previous scholarship, there have been similar attempts

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